‘First Time Female Director’ Film Review: A First-Time Feature Length Disappointment

First Time Female Director lead star, writer and director, Chelsea Peretti is a lot of things.

A talented stand-up comedian who can consistently make audiences (including myself) laugh. An energetic character actor who can make even the mundane whacky as evidenced by her character, Gina Linetti, in the police procedural comedy, Brooklyn 99. A sharp and hilarious writer as seen in series like Parks and Recreation and Kroll Show. She is clearly talented in a lot of fields, but unfortunately, I don’t believe that directing is one of them.

Despite First Time Female Director having more than a handful of moments that made me chuckle, and even laugh at times, this is a film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, that feels incredibly amateurish and bare-bones in terms of story, presentation and cohesiveness.

It’s very obvious that Peretti spent a good chunk of her career on either sketch comedy or mockumentary sitcoms because the film feels like a mashup of both genres. Despite the film technically having an overall plot, the movie feels more like a bunch of random chaotic sketches mashed up together instead of feeling like a single cohesive narrative. Along with that, the film is shot like a mockumentary sitcom a la The Office and Parks and Recreation with lots of shaky camera movements and zoom-ins.

While there’s nothing wrong with making a film in this manner, it still doesn’t make for a cohesive or structured film, especially when Peretti is trying to drive home this theme about the lack of support provided to women for success. It’s clear that this concept is what Peretti wants the audience to take away from the film, but it is hard for this idea to stick when it is buried underneath this constant barrage of chaotic comedic scenes. The film is trying to shove in so many jokes and bits of cringe comedy that it rarely has any time to develop characters, themes or just a reason as to why we should be invested in all of this.

If the whole point of this film is to just have crazy chaotic comedy bits happen back to back, then why does this even need to be a feature-length film? Why can’t this be just a pilot for an Office/Parks and Recreation-type comedy series? The film looks like a TV series anyway, so why not just take this concept and turn it into a series? That way you can have the best of both worlds: being a whacky balls-to-the-wall sketch series while also having more time to build these deeper thematic ideas that Peretti seems interested in.

That’s not to say that this could not work as a feature-length film, it absolutely can if the film reworked some things and actually fully committed to both its mockumentary style of filmmaking and its zany tone. As of right now though, it just feels like a glorified SNL Digital Short. A lot of the actors that are featured in this film like Amy Poehler, Max Greenfield, Megan Mullaly and even Peretti herself seem like they’re playing exaggerated versions of themselves instead of actual characters.

Overall, it really pains me to be this negative as I am a huge fan of Peretti and her work, but there is not much more I can say about the film other than that it is overwhelmingly disappointing.